Wednesday, March 30, 2016

In defence of the deity and the divinity of Christ, in the face of threats to both

Is the deity of Christ under fire? Apparently, there
is a growing body of opinion among some practising Christians, both those
attending and those leading parishes, that calls itself “atheist” going even
further than those calling themselves ‘agnostic’. Searchers will always poke
and prod all issues in their spiritual journey, else what is the path to
spiritual maturity. We are a seeking, curious, restless and persistent species,
and our relationship to “god” however we envision, picture, worship and believe
that reality, continues both consciously and unconsciously as we go through
various experiences of other relationships, births, deaths, funerals, baptisms,
religious celebrations and the accompanying emotional turmoil under our
intellectual agitation.

For many, any religious inquiry is predicated on the
pursuit of some kind of insurance policy, that ‘just in case’ there is a God
and there is a heaven and there is a hell, then these people in looking at the
table set with options so stark, keep the doors of inquiry, scepticism, doubt,
and even fear open, without realizing that they are unwilling to permit a firm
conclusion on any of the questions. Others, on the other hand, demand firm and
final answers, as a way of mediating their anxiety. For some of us, both
approaches are both necessary and potentially spiritually healing. And then
there is the question of which people are in which camp, and with whom we wish
to identify. Presidents over the last several decades wanted and sought the
counsel of the Billy Graham’s, and the Bishops and Cardinals of the
institutional church. Family ceremonies or respectable families were conducted
by and under the auspices of the church, depending on the denominational
flavour of the family. Increasingly, ceremonies like marriages, are conducted
by civil authorities, Justices of the Peace, and others empowered to commission
affidavits and represent the civic authority. We can and do see the carnage in
broken lives, as a direct or indirect consequence of the differences between
individual belief and institutional expectation. How humans conduct our lives
inevitably intersects with specific ecclesial expectations and even
obligations. And, as can only be expected, sometimes those differences are so
serious, in the mind of the church, that persons and families are driven out of
the church. These expulsions too often seem based on the needs of the church
for guarding and protecting and sustaining some long-held dogmatic position: no
artificial birth control, no therapeutic abortions, no doctor-assisted dying,
no sexual relationships outside of marriage, no ordination of the LGBT
community, no lying, no abusive behaviour, no ‘taking the name of God’ in vain,
no failure to attend and to contribute to church finances....and depending on
the period of history, no equality of races, no tolerance of other faiths, no
inter-marriage between faith communities.....and the list could extend much
further.

Judgement, is epitomized in the “judgement day” of
the apocalypse, when in Christian terms, God is to return and divide humanity
into those “acceptable” and admissable” for an eternal heaven of streets paved
in gold and amicable relationships from those “unacceptable and
inadmissible”...promising them an eternal damnation in some kind of hell.

And for many, even the existence of heaven and hell
is open to question, given no human has provided empirical evidence of either.
Imaginative renditions of both abound, however, as humans attempt to grapple
with ultimate prospects for their eternity. The question of whether Hitler
would be admitted to heaven, always a divisive and searing intrusion into any
discussion about heaven and hell, was dropped into a discussion in a Field
Education class at Huron College in 1988. Of course, opinion divided instantly
between the ‘liberals’ who believed he would, and ‘conservatives’ who were
adamant that the answer had to be ‘no way’. Such division is really not
reconcilable. Neither side can ever convince the other of the validity of its
position.

Hence, the perpetual tension that continues to
plague and/or energize the religious/spiritual dialogue.

And such simplistic divides spill over into many of
our issue-oriented conversations about matters of faith.

The question of the deity of Christ, however, has to
be separated from the effectiveness and relevance of the institutional church.
The former is a question of theology, a question of the perception, cognition
and epistemology though which a human relates to Christ, the purported Son of
God and the Son of man. The latter is a matter of human organization and administration, never capable of perfection and wanting in so many different ways as to be barely discernible from a former version. We live in a technological age in which enormous power
has been unleashed through access to both the internet and the digital devices
we use for communication, both incoming and outgoing. That unleashing of “power”
linked to the considerable advances being made by research scientists in so
many fields, naturally and even predictably casts a long shadow of assumed and
presumed power, influence, elevated status, and even heroic powers (at least in
the minds and the imaginations of many movie writers, directors and producers)
on people unaccustomed to such perceived control. The degree to which humans
have prided themselves on the acquisition and the deployment of this new-found
influence continues to segregate those who have already succumbed to the hubris
of which the Greeks spoke so fervently in many of their tragic dramas from
those who resist the temptation to seduction by the ‘drug’ of new power. It is
not so much that many seek to erase or deny or simply ignore the deity of
Christ, as it is that many, because they have not been convinced of the
empirical evidence of the truth and validity of such stories as the ‘virgin
birth,’ the resurrection,’ the miracles documented in the gospels, that they
become sceptical, doubtful and even rejecting of the mysteries embedded in the
gospel stories of Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection. Simultaneously,
the Jesus Seminar has through much scholarly research contributed much to our “knowledge”
of the life of Jesus the man, without in any way attempting to contribute to
the death of Christ’s deity. Not all have perceived their work in a generous and grateful spirit, and have condemned what they see as a blatant reduction of Jesus to a mere human being.

In the words of many lay persons, the ‘holy word’
(the Bible) is merely the writings of human beings, inspired perhaps but
certainly not written or dictated by any God. Nevertheless, these words and
their poetic, historic, liturgical, and even legal import have prompted
Christians and Jews for centuries to pore over their meaning. Their respective theological
and instructional methods for their young, and even for their elders, however,
have been premised on very different bases. Jews, for their part, never presume
to know the mind of God, and have therefore committed themselves individually
and as a community to rigorous study of the Talmud, the Torah and the Midrash,
the layers of attempts to unpack the holy words. Christians, on the other hand,
have fallen into the self-sabotaging trap of presuming, in their own respective
and different kinds of epistemologies,based on an evaluation of different standards, to know both what God
expects from human beings, and how God has ordered the universe and the
relationship between humans and ‘God’ in order to be rewarded with an afterlife
worthy of striving to attain.

Paradoxically, through the theology of the gospels
and the letters in the New Testament, God has also declared, according to some
Christian scholars, that salvation is not and cannot be “earned” by human
action or will (even though created in the image of God, we also have been the
recipients of free will), but that forgiveness was “bought” through the death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the acceptance of such monumental ‘grace’
is the pathway to salvation and an eternal life in heaven with God, Jesus and
many others. We are said to be free to accept or to reject this sacred ‘gift’
and that acceptance changes everything in our lives. Some, however, see this
entry, dubbed a born-again epiphany as much more complicated than a once-in-a
life-time event; they see this as a continual, or even a repeated kind of
experience, congruent and consistent with the narrative chapters of our lives.
Others, in the Christian community focus on the salvation of the whole community,
through peace and reconciliation and social justice, as the only way for each
individual Christian to have access to anything remotely resembling a heavenly
afterlife.

All of the notionsincluded in a litany of Christian ‘beliefs’ from the transformation
thatpurportedly takes place in baptism,
the forgiveness that accompanies the penitential rite, the representation or
the transubstantiation of the eucharist elements of bread and wine, the
resurrection of the dead Jesus into the Risen Christ.....they all stretch human
knowing beyond its capacity to function. In fact, it is in the unknowing that
some pilgrims argue they come even closer to worshipping God, and His Son Jesus
Christ. Some, like the Quakers, even practice a silent worship, in which they
clear the clutter from their minds and their spirits, in the expectation that
somehow they might more likely hear, sense, see, perceive the ‘voice’ of God,
and through such an awesome, shaking quaking experience, come to a more deep
and profound connection to this mystery of God. And Quakers, like Unitarians,
are not restrictive of or controlling of the beliefs of their adherents. They are
both open to believers, non-believers, agnostics and atheists and include many
disenchanted members of other faith communities, who have been so wounded by their
experience in those faith communities, they have left and search for more
welcoming places to gather and to worship.

How we come to ‘know’, while significant in our
spiritual journeys, may be less important than that we do not know and do not
presume to know. And our not knowing, even our not believing will never be of
such strength and ferocity that it can or ever will destroy any deity of Jesus;
it may just be the opposite, that our humility in not knowing, in the way we
seem to have come to need to know the causes of our cancers, the causes of our
domestic violence, the causes of the rape and pillage of the environment and in
that humility still remaining open, receptive and even enthusiastic about
pursuing all of the questions that on the surface would indicate both doubt and
denial, yet underneath demonstrate a profound and earnest and authentic
searching for God who has been described by some as not so much a being, or
even a noun, but rather a verb and a relationship.

Of course, we try to bake into the cake of whatever
tangle of beliefs and doubts we are currently walking in and through, a set of
moral and ethical principles some of which find their source in the holy
writings of most world religions: love one another, seek peace, justice and
reconciliation, leave revenge to God, life is sacred as it is a gift from God. And
then there are also the sanctions we attach to our religious and spiritual
alleyways; and they really are dead-end alleyways in which we become mired,
twisted and contorted in our attempt to demonstrate to others, and one has to
assume also to God, that we know better than ‘those’ people who are doing evil.
We link specific definitions of evil to our faith and justify our attempts to
rid the world of evil, without spending a similar amount of energy, time and
study on what constitutes evil and why circumstances and biographical
narratives can be and have been shown to be linked to criminal behaviour, and
we know much more about how to prevent such evil than we take specific,
individual and collective steps to reduce its impact on our world.

No, the deity of Christ is not dead or drowning; the
mystery of the Christian faith has seen it survive through extreme bloodletting
and violence, through inordinate alienation and dismissal, through sexual
scandal and pecuniary extortion and has lifted and sustained the spirits of
kings and paupers for centuries. The cultures in which it is practiced shift,
and morph and even transform; the ways of learning and the levels of knowing
both have the potential to deepen our capacity for unknowing, and for
developing the maturity, both intellectual and spiritual, to face both without
hiding, avoiding or denying. And whatever God is supportive of a life that
commits to its own spiritual development, including the development of an
intimate relationship with the deity we Christians know as Jesus, The Risen
Christ and the pilgrimage that has been trod before us, is a divinity whose
character and reality we cannot even fully comprehend.

And how we work with, walk with and dance with the mystery,
the unknowing and the infinite says more about a human life worth living and
also worth getting to know more about. Walking, working and dancing in an
opposite direction has no enthusiasmand
the Greek word enthusias was their word for God.